Frank Thomas at Notre Dame

Frank Thomas, the future head football coach at the University of Alabama, was born in Muncie, Indiana in 1898. His father, an iron worker, moved the family to East Chicago six years later in search of employment.

The young Thomas became such a standout high school athlete he skipped his senior year to enter Kalamazoo College in Michigan. After two years there his prowess on the gridiron caught the eye of Notre Dame great Chipper Smith who contrived to get him admitted to his Indiana alma mater.

Arriving in South Bend in1919, Thomas was part of the Notre Dame freshman squad and gained the notice of second-year coach Knute Rockne. Thomas served as a third-string quarterback on the undefeated 1920 team, playing in five games.

His roommate was star George Gipp and the two played professional baseball in the off-season. (Thomas and many other Notre Dame players regularly played professional football on Sundays as well.) Gipp's sudden death from a throat infection in December of 1920 affected Thomas deeply.

"I broke down and cried like a baby," he later said. "It was like losing a brother."

Thomas was a staple of the Notre Dame roster for his junior and senior seasons which saw the team go 10-1 and 8-1-1, respectively. (Late in the 1922 season Rockne shuffled the starting lineup, switching Harry Stuhldreher for Thomas and creating the group that Grantland Rice would dub "The Four Horsemen" two years later).

Thomas' on-the-field decision making earned him the praise of Rockne who called Thomas "a fine field general."

"It's amazing the amount of football sense that Thomas kid has," Rockne told his staff after one game. "He can't miss becoming a great coach some day."

After graduating in the Spring of 1923, Thomas was contacted by the University of Georgia and subsequently hired. As the bulldogs' backfield coach, he was entrusted with importing Rockne's dynamic "Notre Dame Box" offense to southern football.

After a stop as head coach of University of Chattanooga, Thomas was tapped for the head coaching position at Alabama in 1931 following the surprise resignation of Wallace Wade. The Notre Dame alumnus would lead the Crimson Tide a 115-24-7 record, six bowl games and two national titles over the next fourteen seasons.

Dixie Howell and "The Adventures of Frank Merriwell"

Dixie Howell and Jean Rogers in a publicity photo of the All-
American's screen test for "The Adventures of Frank Merriwell."

While Johnny Mack Brown famously used his performance in the 1925 Rose Bowl to launch a career as a movie star, several other Alabama players were wooed by Hollywood during their trips to Pasadena. When the Crimson Tide came west and defeated Stanford in the 1935 Rose Bowl it gave Alabama's All-American Dixie Howell an opportunity to seek his silver screen fortune.

Howell was invited by Universal Pictures president Carl Laemmle to take screen test which led to the Rose Bowl MVP's appearance in the serial "The Adventures of Frank Merriwell."  Howell appeared uncredited in the eleventh film of the 12-part series, "The Crash in the Chasm." It was his only film role.

(A teammate of Howell's, Paul W. Bryant, would take a screen test when he traveled to California as an assistant coach on the Tide's 1938 Rose Bowl team. He never appeared in a film. "They were trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," he later commented.)

The Merriwell franchise originated in a popular series of books published from 1896 to 1912 that were penned by Gilbert Patten writing under the pseudonym, Burt L. Standish. While the plots centered around the lead character solving a mystery or some similar adventure, Merriwell was notable for excelling at sports as an athlete at Yale.

Football games and other athletic contests were often featured prominently in the stories. As a result, the franchise became the model for the wave of juvenile sports fiction that peaked in popularity in the 1940s.

The series was adapted into comic books, radio serials and, eventually, a series of films starring Donald Briggs as the title character. The romantic interest, Elsie Belwood, was played by a pre-"Flash Gordon" Jean Rogers (who may also have appeared in publicity photos for the Rose Bowl game as well).

While Howell's film career came to naught his trip to Hollywood in 1935 did have a major impact on his life. While in California he met aspiring actress Peggy Watters whom he married in Mexico City in November of that same year.

Alabama Chesterfield Cigarettes Advertisement

This advertisement for Chesterfield cigarettes appeared in the Auburn Plainsman's Feb. 13, 1952 issue. It was part of an ad campaign that ran for several months with a different school being featured each week.

The Bama Drug Company was part of the Rexall chain of drug stores which were independently owned an operated. The Tuscaloosa store, located at 1201 University Avenue, was co-owned by Jack McRae and Gordon Haralson.

The Chesterfield brand of cigarettes were introduced in the early 1880s by Drummond Tobacco Company of St. Louis, Missouri. The name derived from Chesterfield County, Virginia. In 1912, Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company reintroduced the brand featuring a blend of Turkish-Virginia tobaccos.

Chesterfield cigarettes were on of the most popular brands sold in the first half of the 20th century. Chesterfield advertisements were ubiquitous in that era often featuring movie stars and professional athletes. Reportedly they were the brand preferred by legendary Alabama player and later head coach Paul W. Bryant.

HT: The War Eagle Reader

The Cramton Bowl

Montgomery's Cramton Bowl shortly after completion in 1922.

On Sept. 20, 1922, Alabama's freshmen football squad traveled to Montgomery where they defeated Sidney-Lanier High School 21-0. The game was the first gridiron contest ever played in the Alabama state capital's new multi-sport venue, The Cramton Bowl.

The stadium under construction.

The stadium was built on the site of a former sanitary landfill owned by local lumberman, F.J. Cramton. The businessman spearheaded the $33,000 fundraising effort to get the facility built after the City of Montgomery balked on the project saying it was too large an undertaking.

The completed Cramton Bowl was designed to host both baseball and football games. The first sporting event at the new stadium was baseball game played May 1922 between Auburn University and Vanderbilt University.

Montgomery attorney James Edson contacted University of Alabama President George H. Denny about arranging to have the Crimson Tide play open its football season in the new stadium. Denny agreed to a game but suggested instead the scheduled contest with Georgia slated for Nov. 25.

Thus the Alabama varsity team opened the season against Marion Military Institute at Denny Field in Tuscaloosa and the freshmen squad traveled to the Alabama capitol. (The Crimson Tide beat Marion 110-0 -- a score which remains the largest margin of victory in the program's history.)

The first major college football contest in the venue was Tulane vs Auburn on Nov. 11, 1922. The local paper implored residents to show up for the game "to show the world MONTGOMERY IS A GOOD FOOTBALL TOWN."

The Tigers, led by their legendary coach Mike Donahue in his final year, trounced the Green Wave, headed by their legendary coach Clark Shaughnessy, 19-0.

Two weeks later, the Tide varsity made the trip to Montgomery themselves and downed the Bulldogs 10-6 in the Cramton Bowl. The finished stadium could accommodate about 7,000 with its permanent seating but reports put the size of the crowd at almost 10,000.

The stadium also was the site of the first football game played under artificial lights in the South when Cloverdale taking on Pike Road High School on the night of September 23, 1927. More than 7,000 spectators were on hand to see the contest under lights that were shipped in from California.

Between 1922 and 1932, Alabama played at least one game every season and then returned to Montgomery intermittently until 1954. Alabama's all-time record at Cramton Bowl stands at 17 wins and 3 losses. The stadium was more renowned as the home of the annual inter-sectional all-star contest -- the Blue-Gray Football Classic, an annual college football all-star game which was held there each December from 1938 until 2001.

The Father of Alabama Football: William G. Little

William G. Little -- or "Bill," as he was invariably known throughout his life -- was born on August 29, 1873 in Sumter County, Alabama near Livingston. He entered the University of Alabama in 1888 but moved to Andover, Massachusetts to attend Phillips Academy in 1891 in anticipation of attending Yale. The death of his brother curtailed those plans and he came back to the Yellowhammer State and enrolled in the UA law school.

Little returned to Tuscaloosa with a passion for new sport of football which he had learned while in the Northeast. He brought his uniform and equipment for playing the game and quickly formed a team of 19 fellow students -- many who had never even seen a football before much less played the game. Little played guard and at 220 pounds he was easily the largest player on Alabama's inaugural squad.

The University of Alabama's 1892 football team.

With Little as captain and E. B. Beaumont as head coach the team played its first game in Birmingham on Friday afternoon, Nov. 11, 1892, at Lakeview Park.

The Alabama students faced off against a picked team from Birmingham high schools, with Alabama winning, 56-0. Alabama would go on to earn a 2-2 record that first season.

After graduating with the class of 1893, Little returned to Livingston where he operated a large farm and owned a retail store. He was active in politics, serving as Sumter County treasurer, tax collector and probate judge. He remained a staunch supporter of Alabama football throughout his life and often invited teams to his Sumter County farm.

Little died on April 11, 1938 in Selma following a short illness.

Champ Pickens' 1925 Book "Alabama"

In 1925, the ever entrepreneurial Champ Pickens struck upon a brilliant idea to promote Alabama football and, in the process, inadvertently created a publishing phenomena. Following the conclusion of the 1924 season, Pickens created an eight-page photo pamphlet titled "Alabama" believed to be the first publication devoted to Crimson Tide football ever produced.

Pickens' book, which appeared sometime after the 1925 spring practices, proclaimed 1924 "the greatest in the history of athletics at the University of Alabama" and boasted of the golf squad's conference championship as well as the baseball and basketball team's second-place finishes. Yet the heart of the book was the series of photographs of the various football games played by the Alabama gridders.

Under second-year head coach Wallace Wade, Alabama had rolled to an 8-1 record earned the Pickens' cup -- the trophy awarded to the champion of the Southern Conference donated by none other than Pickens himself. The Tide had completely dominated the schedule earning seven shutouts and outscoring opponents 290 to 24.

The only defeat Alabama suffered during the 1924 season was a 17-0 drubbing at the hands of the Prayin' Colonels of Centre College -- an unlikely powerhouse that had humbled the vaunted Harvard squad in Cambridge, Massachusetts just three years prior.

Pickens wrote that the varsity prospects for the 1925 season were "very bright" and "it is hoped the 'Crimson Tide' will roll to another championship." His words proved prescient. Not only did Alabama follow up with another Southern Conference Championship, the Tide claimed its first National Championship as well after defeating Washington in the 1926 Rose Bowl.

To commemorate the achievements of the 1925 team, Pickens promptly produced a follow-up book "The Will To Win."

The 1930 Christening of Florida Stadium

The 1930 Florida Homecoming court and escorts await the kickoff.

In 1930 the unbeaten Alabama traveled to Gainesville, Florida on Nov. 8 as the visitors for the Gators' homecoming game. The contest marked the first time the Crimson Tide played a football game in the Sunshine State. The contest also marked the christening of the new Florida Stadium which was dedicated to the Florida servicemen who died in World War I. 

A crowd of 18,000 that were on hand for the game were about 3,000 less that the venue's capacity. A persistent drizzle that lasted throughout the game may have affected the attendance. 

The Crimson Tide were decidedly ungracious visitors as they pounded the Gators 21-0. Alabama outgained Florida 247 yards to 28 and earned 12 first downs to the Gator's two. The Tide would finish the season without a loss to garner an invitation to the 1931 Rose Bowl against Washington State.